Throughout our 10th anniversary season, we are revisiting some of our favorite talks from the Simons Institute's first decade. In this 2020 talk from our Theoretically Speaking public lecture series, Uri Alon (Weizmann Institute of Science) examines how we can understand the core processes of aging by using a stochastic equation for damage accumulation. This approach points toward how to design treatments that can reduce the frequency of a multitude of age-related diseases by addressing their core underlying processes.